Category Archives: * A Few Poems

Lorraine Schein is a New York poet and writer. She likes to write about feminist issues and fantasy/sf themes.

Her poetry and stories have appeared recently in Melusine, Home Planet News, the We’Moon calendar and the anthology Alice Redux, a collection of stories about Alice in Wonderland. Her poetry chapbook, The Futurist’s Mistress, is available from Mayapple Press. She will be teaching a spiritual writing workshop in NYC this summer.

Delphic (Projection #3)

The futurist’s mistress
(In this alternate scenario)
Sleeps in his bed,
Beside his other curved concubines,
Space and Time.
She projects herself, once more,
Endlessly into his future.

The dreams crash and glisten;
Presaging a love
More fantastic than science‑‑

Like this:

Sharon L. Charde, a retired family therapist and writing teacher, is an award-winning poetand recentlyfirst prize winner in the Matt Clark New Delta Review contest. Her work has been published in over thirty journals and anthologies.

She edited and published an anthology of poetry I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, which was a product of her weekly writing workshop at Touchstone, a Litchfield residential facility for adjudicated teen-aged girls where she’s volunteered since 1999. Last summer Touchstone dedicated “The Sharon Charde Poetry Garden” in her honor. She wonfirst prize in the Flume Press 2005 chapbook competition for her chapbook, Bad Girl At The Altar Rail, which was published in September 2005. Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto, a chapbook collection of poems on her son’s death, won first prize from The Dallas Poets Community in 2006, and Backwaters Press published her full-length collection, Branch In His Hand, in November 2008. She won thefirst Litchfield County Inge Morath Award in 2005, given for Sharon’s significant social impact in the arts, and the “Making A Difference For Women Award” from Soroptimist International of Greater Waterbury, CT in 2007. She has received six Pushcart nominations as well as fellowships to both Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center For the Creative Arts.

She has led women’s writing retreats in Lakeville, CT and Block Island, RI since 1990, and has lived in Lakeville since 1970 with her husband John.

AT THE BEST WESTERN

Across the small shining pool I see a boy
about ten, narrow body, loose nylon suit,
and then there you are rising out of him
like steam, in your own ten-year-old body,
navy trunks with the two red stripes down the side,
wet hair sticking to your forehead, you’ve just
gotten out of the pool and are calling me
to come and look at something on the other side.
Your bathing suit is drenched and droopy but you
are widely smiling, you’ve always loved
the water, want me to come in with you now,
swim the length of the shimmering rectangle.
Slowly I rise to move toward you, dive in
and then of course you are gone but the water
takes me in and I begin to stroke, first the crawl,
then I’m on my back and then over on my breast ,
laps and laps, my legs kicking then scissoring, heart
deep in the chlorinated liquid, not drowning.

Like this:

He’s put the war out of his mind. Shelling and murdered relatives behind him. But it lives on in his legs: one limb at a time shakes constantly, even in sleep, as if someone had told him once long ago that he could outrun memory and he half-believed it.

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Claire Zoghb’s first full-length collection, Small House Breathing, won the 2008 Quercus Review annual competition. A chapbook, Dispatches from Everest, is forthcoming from Pudding House Press. Her work has appeared in Yankee, Connecticut Review, Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, CALYX, Saranac Review, Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America, Natural Bridge, Quercus Review, in the anthologies Through A Child’s Eyes: Poems and Stories About War and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems. Twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, Claire was the winner of the 2008 Dogwood annual poetry competition. She is a recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, an Urban Artists Initiative grant, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and has earned a certificate from the Amherst Writers and Artists Institute. She lives in New Haven, where she works as a graphic artist/book designer and teaches writing workshops for kids.

Marianela Medrano-Marra was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and has lived in Connecticut since 1990. A poet and a writer of non-fiction and fiction, she holds a PhD in psychology, a professional counselor’s license and certification as a poetry therapist.

Medrano offers workshops and readings in various venues in Connecticut, New York and other parts of the country. Her poetry, rich with imagery and metaphor, often deals with women’s issues. In her workshops, she combines literature, psychology and spirituality to help others find new ways of knowing the wholeness of human beings.

Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines in Latin America, Europe and the United States. The following are her individual publications: Oficio de Vivir (1986). Santo Domingo: Editorial Buho, Los Alegres Ojos de la Tristeza/Happy Eyes of Sadness (1987). Santo Domingo: Editorial Buho. Regando Esencias/ The Scent of Waiting (1998). New York: Alcance, Curada de Espantos/One Who Has Seen It All (2002). Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Torremozas.

An Urban Sadness Converses with Ours

Leagues and leagues of blue sea
without a voice
a sound to guide us
Names also forgotten
confused in uncertain accents
Before
there were bats in the caves
to guard our names in the Guayabas
Also turtles and sacred trees
-surfaces to write them on-
That was before we drowned
before the wind swallowed us
There are no statues of our ancestors in Manhattan
and we have forgotten how to use wings
Yet inside there is a bright Zemi­
signaling a point of light
A voice sings in the sun
our bodies move towards the unkown.

Peace poet, personal journey facilitator, all around good-guy, Reggie Marra is a poet, author, and educator with over 33 years of experience in elementary, middle, secondary, and higher education.

He is a Master Teaching Artist with the Arts Division of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, and he works with organizations and individuals who are committed to ongoing growth and development. His Integral Journeys™ workshops provide safe, challenging spaces within which to explore identity, perspective, voice and purpose—your authentic place in the world—through the transformative power of language as it manifests in poetry, story, council, humor & nature. Visit his website at IntegralJourneys.com.

He is author of four books: This Open Eye: Seeing What We Do,Living Poems, Writing Lives: Spirit, Self and the Art of Poetry, Who Lives Better Than We Do? and The Quality of Effort.
His poems have appeared in The Underwood Review, Many Waters, Let the Poets Speak, The Fairfield Review, Concepts, The Journal of Pastoral Counseling, “Story, Silence and Spirit: The Crisis of the First-Person Pronouns,” “Transformation or Stagnation: the Resilience Dilemma,” and “What Do You Mean, Spirituality?”

Prior to developing the Integral Journeys programs, he spent twenty-one years as a teacher, coach, and administrator in secondary and higher education. He currently lives in Connecticut with his family. His wife Marianela Medrano-Marra is our featured poet the following Wednesday. They are very different and quite complementary!

Empty Smoking BootAugust 6, 2006

Green shrubs and
distant haze-shrouded
hills lie beyond the
charred, smoldering
car frame. Scattered
tree limbs, twigs and
dry leaves lure the eye
from the blackened
metal to the lone
empty smoking boot
that leans on its side
against the small stone.
Laces through the bottom
four and top two eyelets
connect nothing,
lead nowhere, yearn
for familiar tension
and purpose. Brown
leather upper folded
down and back as if
to offer relief from
the heat for the absent
ankle and foot.